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An imagined order, constructed as a totality, would be the representation­ al hallmark of the worldview that was constructed. In the sciences, the methods would be those oriented towards the prediction and control of the subject matter of realms of enquiry; in the humanities, it would be the construction of interpretations of a panoply of canonical texts. The important thing would be to achieve a knowledge of that which is signified and to regard the process of signification as itself instrumental.

Hobbes' importance is in being one of the first scholars of power to propose an understanding of this key concept in terms which are procedurally legislative; unlike his many forebears in political philosophy , Hobbes tells u s not what power ought t o be but how we may know what it is. Hobbes ' myth In bequeathing to us a set of precepts for the cognition of power Hobbes produced one of the most persistently cited oppositions in all social science: that between a world in which modernity, civility, sovereignty and rule flourished, and a world without these: one in which there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imposed by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force ; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man , solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Foucault ( 1977) provides a sophisticated discussion of power which explicitly breaks with any conception of ideology. Foucault is interesting in at least two ways for such a book as this. First, he provides us with a critique of much of the conventional 'views' on power. The core of this critique is that the conception of power needs to be freed from its 'sovereign' auspices as a prohibitory concept. Such a concern with the facilitative and productive aspects of power relates well to the kind of arguments which have been made most clearly by Parsons ( 1967) .